


The Heartlines

by Spark_Writer



Category: The Penderwicks Series - Jeanne Birdsall
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, Friendship/Love, Romance, Romantic Friendship, skyffrey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:15:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spark_Writer/pseuds/Spark_Writer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penderwicks AU. Each time a person falls in love, a thin scar called a Heartline appears on their wrist. Skye resolves to keep herself from ever getting one of these marks for fear that she will lose control over her heart if she does. Then she meets Jeffrey. Skye/Jeffrey</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heartlines

Skye had hated the marks with a ferocious conviction all her life.

In school, her classmates had been both thrilled and anxious when their first ones blazed onto the tender underside of their forearms; the boys clapped each other on the back in fond amusement and the girls gasped and giggled and admired the fresh scars with blushing reverence. Her father had had only three on the underside of his wrist when Skye was a child, and she noticed that the last line was different from the others. It had seared deeper into his skin, leaving a darker, rougher scar than the previous two. She did not understand why this was until she asked Rosalind about it several years later.

"The deeper the love for someone, the deeper the Heartline," Rosy had explained, looking pensive. "That last line on Daddy's arm is the one he got when he fell in love with Mommy."

"So you get a Heartline when you love someone?" asked Skye, skeptical.

"You get one when you fall in love with somebody. When you adore and appreciate them, and want to be with them all the time, and would do anything for them. You can only get a Heartline with a certain kind of love. For instance, I love Daddy and you and Jane and Batty, but there aren't any Heartlines on my arm, yet. See?" And she pulled back her sweatshirt sleeve, exposing a stretch of pale skin that was completely blank from wrist to elbow.

Skye was silent for a moment, then asked, "Can you control whether you get one of those marks or not?"

"I don't think so," Rosalind murmured, pushing her sleeve down. "You can't exactly choose not to fall in love, can you?"

"Rats," said Skye. Getting a Heartline meant losing control of one's heart, and that frightened her far more than she liked to admit.

Consequently, she dedicated much of her growing up to keeping herself devoid of Heartlines. She woke each morning with shivers of illogical dread shooting down her spine; she would turn her left forearm over and feel the warm rush of relief at seeing that it was unmarred. She was proud of her achievement, at remaining utterly in control of her feelings and desires. Skye was still Heartline free when Rosy and Jane began getting theirs. She teased and congratulated them, all the while feeling a deep disgust for the amorous tally lines on their wrists. It was horrible, she thought, to fall in love and know that whole world could see it. There were ways of prolonging the agony, far-fetched tips that parents passed on to their children. Wear long sleeves, blame the scar on an accident with a kitchen knife, never wave with your left arm, wear a bracelet. The list went on and on, full of idiotic solutions that never got a person anywhere. Even worse were the people that flaunted their Heartlines, bragging about them to an alarming degree, so stupidly proud that their heart was literally in someone else's hands.

Skye thought they were all morons.

As she grew into a teenager, her job became exponentially more difficult. The closer she and Jeffrey got, the more she wrestled with her feelings, battling to convince her heart that her feelings for the boy were completely platonic. During her first trip to visit Jeffrey in Boston, Skye awoke on her last night with her heart jolting strangely and an ominous tingling in her forearm.

"No," she'd whispered, horrified. "No, no, no, no, no—I'm not getting one, not ever." She jiggled her arm, flexing her fingers against the warm, prickling pain just beneath her skin. After several tense moments, the sensation faded and Skye fell back onto her pillow, glaring into the darkness. "I am in control," she had said to the empty room. "I am always in control." Then she fell asleep and did not remember the incident in the morning.

At Point Mouette, Skye came so dangerously close to getting a Heartline that it took a superhuman amount of effort for her to redirect her thoughts to les sentimental things. Jeffrey—the mere image of him dissolving into a heap on the beach, distraught over Alec—had almost done her in. But there were more pressing matters to deal with, so she threw herself into action, feverishly grateful for the distraction. It went on like this for so long that, after a certain point, it became barely noticeable. Skye was used to shoving her feelings away each time she saw Jeffrey. It was a dismal routine.

. . .

. . .

Three weeks after Skye turned twenty-one, Jeffrey invited the sisters to come down to New York City for a few weeks of urban adventure in the gorgeous late-June weather. He had received a full scholarship to Juilliard and the Penderwicks had already attended many of his public concerts, always deeply impressed at his ever-improving musical skills. Batty adored Jeffrey's playing and had her sights set on Juilliard as well, even though she was thirteen and a half and still slept with Funty on occasion. Whenever Skye complimented Jeffrey's piano playing, which was always, he would feign shock and tease her mercilessly. "You're a complex physics major, how can you possibly appreciate my music?" he would ask, laughing.

"When have I ever been one-dimensional?" Skye would retort. "Physics is only a small composite of my spectrum of interests."

"Says the girl who refused tickets to the soccer world cup because she was working on an 'extremely fascinating' theory of momentum."

"And yet I'm still a better soccer player than you."

Jeffrey would look into her eyes with a grudging grin, utterly unaware of the internal battle raging in Skye's head. She would marshal her thoughts—she always did—and move on to another topic of conversation, burning with annoyance at the gullible human heart.

Now, as she sat in the bedroom she still shared with Jane during summers, she thrust a last pair of denim shorts into her suitcase and zipped it shut with an air of finality. Looking around for any forgotten articles of clothing, she saw a rectangle of wall where the lavender paint was slightly darker. This was because Skye had taken her full color poster of the periodic table to college with her—it was the only accessory in her plain dorm room. That and a few photographs of her family and Jeffrey—and a small one of Hound, as he had passed away several years before. Much to Skye's relief, Jane had taken her catastrophically messy habits to her own college where she was a creative writing major; now their room was pleasantly neat, empty of the stacks of paper and books and pens that were always getting under everyone's feet. Jane's favorite books were back on her shelf for the summer, though their covers bore new scratches from being carted around from home to college and back again. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets also had a large coffee stain on the spine, evidence of Jane's latest addiction.

"Has anyone seen my copy of Pymalion?" Mr. Penderwick called from out of sight, sounding desperate. "I need to reference it and I can't find it anywhere."

Skye stood up from the bed, awash in a sudden, vicious memory of having to read the play in high school.

The door hinge of the upstairs bathroom creaked and Jane appeared in the hall, twisting her hair into a bun. "I borrowed it last night, Daddy," she yelled over the banister. "Professor Gout recommended I read it this summer."

"Professor Gout?" Skye joined Jane in the hallway, incredulous. "As in the acute attack of inflammatory arthritis?"

"It's his name," snapped Jane. "Have some respect."

"Jane, I'm willing to bet any amount of money that you laughed when he introduced himself."

Jane fixed Skye with an irritable pout. "I didn't laugh," she replied. "I, at least, have some semblance of maturity."

"Mm. You'd do better to work in the honesty area, really."

Jane smacked Skye's arm, lightly, and Skye saw the neat row of Heartlines below the crease of her elbow. "I still don't understand how you don't have one," remarked Jane, following Skye's gaze. "I get new ones all the time."

"I'm not like you," said Skye.

Jane gave her an arch look. "Despite your efforts to seem otherwise, I know you have a noble heart and I know you care about certain people."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm in love with any of them."

Jane tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, eyes shining with a strange enthusiasm. "Not yet," she said. "But love is like a landmine, Skye. You can't see it coming and you can't escape it and you will never look at things the same afterward. It's the most beautiful, tragic inevitability in the history of humankind."

A beat passed, then Skye spoke. "Well, that was unbearably verbose."

Jane's dreamy look vanished, replaced by one of exasperation. "It's good to know you picked up something from all that vocabulary studying for the SAT," she said nastily, and flounced off in high dudgeon.

Skye waited for the inevitable slamming of doors that always seemed to follow their arguments, and felt grimly satisfied when Jane caught her toe in the doorjamb and erupted in a litany of Victorian profanity.

Though it was drenched in flowery descriptions, Jane had a point, and it was because of this very point that Skye kept her heart closed. If you couldn't see it coming, you couldn't escape it, and you were never the same afterward, love really didn't seem any better than a landmine. Except, perhaps, for the fact that a landmine blew you to bits, and love kept you alive in a state of bleak broken heartedness. Well, some people never had their hearts broken; Skye knew that. But that was if they did everything right—and seeing as she did everything wrong, love and herself seemed a disastrous combination.

It was Batty who jarred Skye from her thoughts. "Do you think Jeffrey'll let me play one of the grand pianos this time?" she asked, coming up the stairs with her arms full of laundry.

"One can only hope," said Skye. "Yours needs a break from you playing it twenty-four seven."

"No matter how much anyone resents my piano playing, it's still better than you screeching on that trumpet."

"Point taken," Skye acknowledged grudgingly. She paused. "It's still incredibly weird seeing Heartlines on your arm, Batty," she murmured, staring at the exposed underside of her sister's forearm. "You're so young."

"Rosy had one when she was thirteen."

"You have two," Skye reminded her. The first had been a boy in Batty's fifth grade history class, named Calvin. He was an extremely shy sort of person, but Batty obviously adored him and was devastated when he moved away several months later. The second had appeared on Batty's arm just before her thirteenth birthday, and when her sisters begged her to tell them who it was for, she eventually explained that she loved one of her girlfriends—Heather, who played the harp and took long, sunny walks with Batty after school.

"She's the one who's always laughing, right?" Jane had asked, and when Batty nodded, she said, "I like her," in a very decided way.

"I can't help it," said Batty, shrugging. "And it doesn't make much sense to take relationship advice from someone who's never had a Heartline."

"It doesn't mean I'm inept when it comes to feelings."

Batty raised her eyebrows. "You know," she remarked after a moment, "This must be a record."

"What must be?"

"You being twenty-one and never having fallen in love."

"I think I'll continue the trend."

"For how long?" asked Batty, shifting her armload of clothing.

"Forever," said Skye and granted her younger sister with a tight smile before heading for the stairs.

"Good luck," said Batty, with a strange, ambiguous mixture of sarcasm and sincerity.

"Don't need it," Skye replied over her shoulder.

She felt a sudden hot prickle in her left wrist as she descended the stairs and, heart pounding, she pushed all thoughts of Jeffrey from her mind, violently relieved when the tingling faded with them. Embarking on another trip to see Jeffrey was like striding into a minefield and knowing about it beforehand. It was treacherous and unwise, and still Skye kept walking.


End file.
